Incentive to Self-Organize and Scale

December 19, 2017December 19, 2017Leave a comment

To avoid the complexity of a socio-technical transformation in a mature publicly traded corporation, we may build by analogy in simpler terms. Suppose two lumberjacks have the property rights for adjacent properties. They have the option of working together of separately. Even if they are identical in strength, skill, resources, and tools, the processes available grow exponentially if they cooperate. The process option of each individual worker may continue, but entire sets of new options that only cooperation may accomplish become available. If we add two more lumberjacks, there is four times the land, four times the potential output of four individuals, plus the additional options that only groups of two, three, or all four may pursue cooperatively.

It is easy to assume, up to our rough limit of 10 members, that the lumberjacks gain from cooperation additional options as a decision-making unit, using each of their property and abilities in ways that acting individually would lack. However, the larger that group becomes, the more effort they require when attaining consensus on which of the processes to pursue. The group of 10 may elect a leader or vote democratically, but two primary feedback mechanisms will arise. Productivity when the workers act out of sight of the others will become judged on output. Productivity when all work as a group will become judged on direct observation. Once this company of lumberjacks grows beyond 10, there are obvious diminishing returns for direct observation, even an impossibility of observation. Once we collect a group of 40, 70, or 200 lumberjacks, managers who coordinate decisions, observe their team for performance, judged exclusively on productivity become an inevitable recourse. 200 lumberjacks simply cannot cooperate effectively in a single forest through reliance on direct informal interaction.

Likewise, even without introducing the complexity of a legal, accounting, tax, or government system, and even before we consider actual market demand or the possibility of competitors, divisions in the organization emerge to benefit every worker. Specialized knowledge on planting new trees, care for trees over multiple years, coordinating which areas to work, care for the tools, and the preparation and shipping of the logs are not only distinct processes from the original effort of the individual lumberjack, but are also increasingly important to the optimization of long-run residual claims. Therefore, even if we assume it possible for all workers to equally “own” the organization, meaning that all have an equivalent residual claim, knowledge and specialization will still drive the introduction of management and coordination based on the output performance of distributed decision-making units.

If we now add a single competitor to this logging industry, a very simple “game” becomes available. Suppose one the residual claimants of one organization decides to hire workers based on wages and the other remains an equal partnership with no wage employees. The incentive structure of the residual claimants and the wage employees are different, creating fractal changes at scale. While wage employees gain remuneration as they work, they do not bear the risk that that the residual claim is zero. While wage employees may need to know some skills for the job, they will not need to know all the processes of the organization. Also, while the residual claimants may only exit the partnership with some difficulty, the wage employee could exit any time to pursue a better opportunity. Therefore, while residual claimants have incentive to ensure the long-run sustainability of the processes, the wage employees have incentive to maximize the short-run behaviors prescribed by the wages.

Comparing these two competitors, we begin to see advantages to the use of wage workers who do not possess a residual claim. First, because they do not possess a long-run interest in the organization, wage employees may carry out the calculated risks of the managers without fear and hesitation that the collectively-owned organization would. If one of these risks produces a windfall gain, the organization gains competitive advantage. Second, because their focus is on short-run optimization of the behavior pattern demanded by the incentive structure, wage employees can perform tactical activities that require less knowledge of the organization as a long-run system. Wage workers make the workforce more malleable and responsive to incentive structures in aggregate. Third, because the optimal number of workers for any one specialty may change over time, the competitor with a variable pool of wage employees can respond more quickly and with less risk than an organization that is taking on a partner with an equal residual claim to assets they did not originally participate in earning. Fourth, the ability to grow the workforce with wage employees in a boom cycle without increasing the total residual claimants allows the organization to respond to the incentives of fleeting opportunities with a limited subset of the long-run disincentives.

Our first conclusion should be that some introduction of wage employees in each organization is inevitable. If we compare an organization with 10 residual claimants and a variable wage workforce of 5 employees, compared to an organization with any number of residual claimants fixed at a number between 10 and 15, the use of wage employees creates more options and some potential for competitive advantage. However, if we add more organizations, we can also see that the effectiveness in optimizing decision-making becomes as much based on knowledge of coordination and incentive structure as it is of the given hierarchy or individual value production. Where a production process was highly stable, predictable, and productivity easily measured on output, a larger number of residual claimants could cooperate as partners. Where the process is highly variable, requiring little knowledge, and productivity is the result of effect management rather than worker virtuosity, minimizing residual claimants while relying on wage earners will be more effective.

There is significant incentive to assure that an organization builds itself not through the exclusive dichotomy of long-run residual claimants that bear all the risk and short-run wage workers without systemic constraints or incentives. The pressure for stability from wage employees and the necessity of management incentives that more closely align to the optimization of long-run residual claims combine to create a gradation of fixed-claim wage earners with specific performance constraints. The salaried employee and the manager compensated partly in company stock can optimize the preservation of an externally directed mid-run. Neither feel the freedom to leave the company due risk and sunk cost. Neither feel the full freedom to exploit new opportunities held by a partner with equal residual claims.

The clear trade-off in a corporation, reliant on salaried employees with slow aggregation of a small percentage of residual claims, is the increasing and widespread hesitation to act, combined with diffusion of responsibility for emergent decisions. When growth remains strong and fitness of solution to market context remains stable, bureaucratic rationalization continues to preserve the organization rather than the optimization of the residual claim. Once growth stagnates, it becomes clear the organization became fine-tuned to internal signals of political disputes while placing layers of noise between decision-making units and the external signals of the market. Transformation is a paradigmatic shift from a structure no longer adapting its knowledge production to its changing market context, to a new paradigm in its place. The challenge of transformation, primarily, is the development of new knowledge networks that can create sufficient benefit to entice the bureaucrat to make the shift to the new paradigm of systemic incentives and constraints

The nature of the production process and the structure of the industry shape the way market forces reward variations in what is otherwise an identical number of inputs. A tax accounting firm or a law firm may rely primarily on equal partnership or tiered partnership with few wage employees relative to the residual claimants. In an oil or mining endeavor with major risk that only requires capital to pull wage employees and the tools of production from other opportunities, such as applying recent technology to previously unexplored mineral rights, the fewest number of residual claimants necessary to raise the necessary capital optimizes the use of a much larger organization of wage employees, vendors, and contractor firms. Many publicly traded corporations are some mix of options, allowing different residual claims in the form of preferred stock, common stock, bonds, pensions, etc. The selection of incentive structures and systemic constraints provide the administrative context for an organization. Decisions regarding the internal context and the selection of an external context with which it must integrate is the realm of competitive strategy.

Economic Knowledge Organization

December 19, 2017December 19, 2017Leave a comment

Transformation is the systemic restructuring of the knowledge production processes and decision-making networks within an organization. While a precise history and understanding of the organization status quo is impossible, it is also foolhardy to begin a transformation without any respect for the system as we find it. Mature organizations adapt over extended periods of time to a unique pattern of decision-making. The individual workers change continuously, so the organization replicates knowledge of the decision-making processes as patterns of behavior increasingly distant from original context. The systemic understanding of the original context for the behaviors becomes separate from the decision-making units performing the behavior. The origin of organizational knowledge becomes increasingly distant from the processes using outdated knowledge.

Maturity produces stability at the expense of adaptability, just as the bones of an adult gain load-bearing capacity at the expense of the trauma-bearing malleability of the bones in a child. Children rarely need to lift heavy objects but frequently fall, while a young father may frequently lift and move heavy objects but falls that might break his adult bones are very rare. The goal here is not to contend that transformation is impossible or that maturity is superior to malleability. Instead, we should recognize from the outset that each have costs and benefits. The first consideration of any disruptive influence must be what purpose current adaptations serve.

We should “start at the beginning” then, and define what an organization is, why it survives, and what it means that it matures. Every organization is a combination of decision-making units that cooperate collectively in the expectation of individual benefit. However, the decision-making unit is neither the collective nor the individual. The totality does not make decisions independent of the individuals comprising it. The individual, though self-interested, never makes decisions in a vacuum. Therefore, the decision-making units within the organization could be pairs of individuals, formally identified groups, or informal teams who act together. Likewise, these individuals are not exclusively participating in the decision-making unit that performs within the boundary of the organization. The knowledge worker might make decisions within the organization as part of a jobsite decision-making unit, as a family-system provider, as an alumnus of a university, or as a thought-leader in a professional community. If we lose ourselves in consideration of the individuals, we may become convinced of chaos and uncertainty, never knowing if cooperative self-interest will optimize the family, fraternity, or career prospects at the organization’s expense. However, as we scale to include larger groups we find that emergent consistencies hold despite these individual differences. The operational “team” follows patterns of behavior even as individuals join or exit. We should thereby place our consideration of the decision-making unit at this “team” level.

The decision-making unit is not the individual, while each of these individuals participate in a multitude of decision-making units. We need not apply a hard constraint to the number of individuals a decision-making unit may contain in practice, though we may say with confidence that one of two constraints limit this size. First, beyond 10 individuals it will become evident that a subset of members is the informal decision-making unit within the formal collective. These leaders must agree or a decision fails, while the remainder provide knowledge but will defer to group decisions. The ability to remain silent altogether increases as the diffusion of responsibility, whether economic, social, or psychological, spreads across a larger collection. Second, beyond 10 individuals, diminishing marginal returns make it increasingly difficult to ensure that each member is producing the maximum effort on behalf of the group. A large formal group then creates informal smaller groups that ensure their own expectations of cooperative effort and protect their own group from outsiders. In the mature enterprise, there typically exists a mixture of formal hierarchy and informal group dynamics. The formal hierarchy develops each time a costly situation makes the benefit of observers that ensure the productivity of subordinates outweigh the cost of trusting individuals to optimize their own productivity. The informal groups that form as decision-making units distinct from the formal hierarchy do so to participate in the spread of beneficial knowledge that the formal hierarchy cannot provide alone.

To answer the question, “Why do organizations form?” we should rely on an economic definition of value creation as the combination of inputs with knowledge. Value increases through many mechanisms, but knowledge is what makes value increase exponentially for a linear increase of inputs. Moreover, this value is subjective but aggregate. The “owners” of an organization do not own much at all, if ownership is the freedom to dispose of inputs according to any desire. For instance, the owner of an airplane is not free to land on an interstate highway, and the owner of a lake is not free to restrict air traffic or the orbit of satellites overhead. Property is not only material, but also intangible. Property ownership is not freedom of disposal, it is the legal privilege to constrain the use of a mutually identifiable resource. Those who form an economic organization do not create property that they may own it and dispose of freely. Instead, they cooperate to constrain and guide the use of resources to maximize value through the addition of knowledge. All value creation is part of a knowledge process. The “owners” of an organization, whether a sole proprietor, partnership, or the shareholders of a publicly-traded corporation, are the residual claimants to any value leftover.

We will adopt the terminology of the “residual claimant” to maintain strict honesty that the organization is not profit seeking nor the owner of property. Each socioeconomic organization is collection of individuals with knowledge, engaging in cooperative self-interest, making decisions that maximize the incremental subjective value of outputs. The residual claimants receive both the profit and the loss of such value-add activities. The residual claimants invest in a production process, but their residual claim at any time boundary exists as a positive or negative return.

Transformation has a clear economic definition with these concepts as a foundation. Transformation is a paradigmatic shift in decision-making processes needed once an organization can no longer attain the knowledge required to maximize value creation. The resistance to such transformation comes from many sources. The benefits of the new paradigm are often unknown while the cost to the individuals that comprise the organization are often high. The changes necessary for one set of decision-making units may undermine the performance of other decision-making units. The benefits of the new paradigm may benefit newcomers, while incumbents rely on the formal and informal networks to resist this challenge to the processes that benefit them.

Democracy in America

December 6, 2017Leave a comment

The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high- minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

– Alexis de Tocqueville

Predicate Disintegration

November 20, 2017November 20, 2017Leave a comment

The change in power structures that occur in developed society once the image and the sign gain primacy over the real and the signified emerge from the decoherence of subject and object. This becomes predicate disintegration in the postmodern mindset; refusing to privilege a subject or alienate an object, postmodernism instead reviews assemblages of a perpetual flux of concatenated disjunctive predicates. Predicates without an object, predicates without a subject. This makes for difficult psychotherapy and philosophy alike, but this also creates the perfect phase-space for blurring any line between resentment and seduction, that is, alienated life and artistic revaluation. This mindset evolves organically from the influence of Feuerbach and Nietzsche, their critique of society waking up from early modern Christianity. Postmodernism secularizes the disintegration of reality in the wake of industrialized civilization, globalization, and the loss of faith in classical liberalism and technology. Not only is the sacred-in-itself dead, as Nietzsche claimed, the real-in-itself is dead, lacking certainty of former subject-object relations. The signified divorced from its referent extends into all language, science, and culture, due to the work of Kant and Hume.

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

– Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

as quoted in Society of the Spectacle

While Nietzsche held a principal place in Heidegger’s existentialism, Deleuze & Guattari combine the lineages of the school of suspicion, committing themselves entirely to rhizomatic diffusion; depersonalization, dehumanization, and decoherence are the only paths to total collectivism, as any amount of egoism breaks apart the flux. Predicate disintegration is the overarching goal in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: the only way to cure the overproduction maladies of psychosis and capitalism is though the simultaneous removal of the subject and object. Private property, as objects, cease to exist automatically in a flux of collective predicates. Capitalist subjection ends when society relinquishes the subject. While this seems like a radical conclusion, it is a natural paradigmatic evolution from the pluralistic existentialism. If the State apparatus not only entraps labor, but the entire social body and the full body of the Earth within its capitalistic bureaucratic machine, it becomes impossible to choose between accelerating the process or attempting the communist revolution. The flux of assemblages, stratified and mechanize, enclose subjected machines within a state autocracy.

In the opening of Anti-Oedipus, we find an elucidation of mechanized enclosure that occurs in capitalist psychodynamic alienation. The social totality, once comprised of free organisms that flow libidinal value without restriction, become a series of machines that break this flow. Breaking apart this flow means we do not “live nature as nature, but as a process of production” because the capitalistic dichotomy of consumer and producer splits every libidinal flow into a network of exchanges. To the human, everything is technological, and a world of desiring machines interrupt libidinal nature, confiscating its power. The odd mix of Freud with Marx interprets libidinal desiring machines as the interruption and redirection of flows for the sake of organization. Once the social body, human body, and cosmic body all become fully rationalized, all energy is a production process that is inescapable. Against this totalitarian enclosure, only one escape is possible, to cease any organization, distinction, or identity. Thus, when the State apparatus fully utilizes both production and anti-production, external as well as internal deterrence, through an image of the State and the subject that couples itself to the power of the War Machine, the only way to break out is in the body without an image, without organization, without fetishism of capital, sex, or identity, without any interpretation or intention.

The Body Without Organs is thereby a self-similar reproduction of capital itself. Because the fetishism of commodities and the multiplication of capital produces its own relative emptiness, the machine with an image, organization without life, is the essence of capitalism itself. From their psychodynamic-Marxist perspective, this is the origin of paranoia and psychosis. Yet this echo of “God is dead,” which became, “Capitalism is dead,” reveal the same emptiness, certainly. However, it is not the emptiness of the religious believer, but of the institutions attempting a secular reproduction of Protestant egalitarianism; it is not the emptiness of the capitalist, laborer, or consumer, but of the intellectual institutions expecting political economy to reproduce the meaning and significance of mystic natural chaos in the primitive milieu. For those of us who never expected the State apparatus to provide meaning, significance, or identity, the death of God (the French theocratic monarchy) and the death of Capital (the French socialist republic) are not only empty sentiments, but also foolish ones.

Freedom of speech, militia, assembly, religion, and property invest no personal identity. Capital has no identity, no goal, no vision. To Deleuze & Guattari, the machines of socialization and political economy all orchestrate their identities around the power of capital, but capital is a non-entity, it is a representation of potential future exchange. Thus, the hollowed-out ego and the hollowed-out capital are two identical dilemmas faced only by those who place their “bad faith” in the security of a centralizing, predetermined identity for both economy and self.

Finding that Capital-in-itself is the perfect complement to libido-in-itself, in the absence of meaning or significance, leaves one with the Body Without Organs. The paradox of a body without organs, however, is an intrinsic false consciousness resulting from a spectacular deception; the belief that the collective forms an independent bodily organism with volition and purpose of its own makes the “mind” and the “economy” something they are not, and were never meant to become. While D&G go to great lengths to intertwine Freud’s writings on Schizophrenia to the social unconscious of capitalism, we can regain our objectivity easily with a walk through a forest: walking along we find a “tree” with immense growth of fungi running up its trunk, we look up and behold its branches long gone, the upper bark gone, the wood beneath bleached by the sun. This is not a “tree” in the living botanical sense, but we would not call it a “corpse” or a “fungal apparatus” either. The body, which we predicated as a tree-subject turns out full of life not its own; the tree contains not tree-organs but is full of insect machines and fungal machines.

Seen this way, the Body Without Organs implies, not a machination, but a misunderstanding. We were simply wrong to ascribe the subject identity, there is nothing unheimlich about a tree that is full of life, but life no longer its own. Capital, like an Observer, is a perfectly empty vessel that contains none of the interrelated and decentralized value streams that make it possible. Precisely because of this, it works as socioeconomic construct that makes the interaction of networks of value streams possible.

Rather than finding existential “thrown-ness” liberating at the individual level, the Marxist intelligentsia treats the absence of predetermined meaning as a crisis at the social level. Capital taken as a universal, the fetishized social-in-itself miraculated to causa prima, becomes a Body Without Organs; the bureaucratic expansion of socialist rationalization brings about the replacement of organic sub-systems with disciplinary automation and mechanization. By tying Oedipus to Capital as the miraculated first-mover of generalized labor, they ascribe the disease of bloated economic enslavement to the wrong monetary power. Presenting Freud and Marx as a single critical voice anchors the anti-fascist pessimistic virtualization paradigm, but trading Oedipal fascism for adolescent narcissism appears the only distinction of the system. Following the chain, throughout the network, telling the narrative as energy diffuses into socio-libidinal fabric; these are excellent strategies of negative critical analysis. In fact, this strategy has no partisan leaning on its own. Anywhere a group isolates distorted evidence from statistical analysis, ignoring the dynamic interactions of the concrete entities underlying the population, seeing patterns where none exist because it fits their ideology, a rhizomatic analysis of real entities is the best path to refute the false hypothesis.

Combining Freud and Marx without a meaningful functionalism to replace the criticized system merely latches onto the bad faith of each domain, the psychodynamic and the capitalistic, to write philosophical poetry. The labor theory of surplus value, applied to a network of psychodynamic subconscious, gives mysticism and collectivism total license to invent fictional machinations.

The labor theory of value says the exchange value of commodities emerge from the average socially necessary production time for the aggregate supply, which does not account for the subjective or inter-subjective marginal utility basis of pricing. The Austrian school likewise applied the latter to currency itself to better account for inflation, recession, and other element of the business cycle. If we treat money as a commodity, then price represents the information between supply and demand regarding the marginal utility of the product and the marginal utility of the currency. The tentative “price” as an expression of utility and the actual currency exchanged as an actualization of trade blur into one entity for Marx.

However, the mystery of a generalized surplus value of labor disappears when we treat currency, loans, and capital as stockpiled commodities subject to marginal utility. The capitalist manages the marginal utility of credit, risk, assets, debt, and cash as much as investments, salaries, and liabilities. Even if we apply the ecological economics concept of energy expended over time, the capitalists commoditize their accumulated virtuosity as a reputation mortgaged through monetization.

To extend the productive capacity to libidinal exchange within the social body, libidinal energy must generalize to represent all valuation; including thoughts, promises, sex, and vague sentiments of culture. The same problem arises for each movement of the Freudo-Marxian refrain: libidinal exchanges not represented in actions of psychodynamic energy-time and social exchanges not represented in actions of labor energy-time become treated as repressions rather than admitting they did not exist. This diminution of particularized actions on behalf of a generalized subconscious asserts a universal that bears no similarity to reality. Mysticism is the only means by which a prophecy of hidden inter-subjective machinations will gain expression. The only real duplicity, in each case, lies in the partisan ascension that occurs on the foundation of such universals. Whether the universalization of castration anxiety or the universalization of class or racial plurality, the duplicity is the willingness to deny evidence based exclusively upon fictitious re-territorialization boundaries.

It is precisely the Oedipal mythology, Leninist mysticism, and Nazi occultism that reveals the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic machination. As Ludwig von Mises predicted in his treatise Human Action, no minority can maintain the subjection of the majority indefinitely. Nor likewise government expansion of “public” debt remain sustainable forever. The point is equally true of both Oedipal superego and fascist communism: the ego will not endure the “bad faith” of an artificial totalitarian all-father for long without madness or suicide as consequence. Viewed through the schizoanalysis proposed by Anti-Oedipus, The Body Without Organs is the final stage of bureaucratic socialism (or “late” capitalism) is the State apparatus no longer living as an organism, but as an autonomous machine, entrapping all organisms as its expendable, reproducible, automated cogs; desiring-machines that produce not only consumables, but also produce desire itself. Taken at its extreme, the only escape is insanity, revolution, or near-incomprehensible philosophy.

The Mediated Imaginary

November 18, 2017Leave a comment

The common misconception of utopian collectivism arises in the elucidation of the imaginary by which power mediated its control, only to replace this image with another. When the divisions of consciousness begin producing incompatible imagery in a contest for the survival of their medium, the psychodynamic philosopher will call this schizophrenia. Once socialist democratic capitalism fully rationalizes and isolates the production process of mediated images, it feed the images back to the population, hiding the rise of bureaucratic totalitarianism. The mediated imaginary, automating its oscillatory precession, simultaneously comes under total control by the State apparatus; but the apparatus itself becomes meaningless as it completes the efforts to automate its processes. Meanwhile, the burden of responsibility diffuses into the bureaucracy, every action become its opposite movement, revolution and cyclical change lose any distinction, leaving no one capable of a reversal.

Society of the Spectacle

As Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle elucidates, postmodern or “late capitalism” not only separates individuals from one another by making images primary in all economic relations, it further separates everyone by demanding their attention to the mediated imaginary, thereby making image primary in all social relations as well. An automated State apparatus mediates each image. Prior to mass monetary exchange, globalization of the division of labor, mass media, and the internet, individuals experienced the real with each of their senses on equal primacy, always secondary to the milieu and its objects. When images, typography, iconography, films, contracts, bank notes, treaties, mass media, advertisements, and propaganda replace all economic and social exchange, images and the visual become primary in every activity.

This is the Society of the Spectacle, in which an image always precedes the real, making reality secondary to the virtual. For Debord, this implies that control over the image gives up control of society; between the regulatory bureaucracy of the State and the financial reification and valorization of protectionist capitalism, autocracy isolates and controls the masses. The sign of money precedes the action of both capitalist and labor, the contract of the corporation precedes the possession of the factors of production, the image of the object precedes its mass production and consumption, the image of reality precedes the experience of any lesser attempt to reproduce this imaginary within the real. While the virtualization of exchange value allows the acceleration of capital, it also makes the movement of immense fortunes impossibly fast for the individual to control their own wealth under crisis conditions. While the mechanization of production allows the acceleration of labor, it also leaves the corporation in a constant anxiety that subsequent disruptive technology will displace them, just as the machines displaced animal and human labor. The alienated masses become dependent on the State control of the monetary virtual and on the Corporate control of the mediated imaginary, isolating each unnecessary laborer in a pre-packaged identity based on debt, consumerism, and passive acceptance.

The society that no longer experiences events directly will likewise lose the significance of all experiences. Without any natural anchor for the significance of reality, we no longer experience events at all. Corporations and the State mediate the images of every event, enframed by technology, so that society experiences fashion, war, politics, fiction, and murder all as an equally insignificant imaginary stimulation. We experience more images of the mediated virtual than we experience touch of nature and other, sounds of birds and singing, or smells of trees and seawater. Even war, murder, and revolution become merely viewed. The society of the mediated imaginary loses its reality in the spectacle, every isolated viewer unable to act, part of an audience that becomes increasingly accustomed to passive observation.

Mediated images deliver a spectacle of consumable reality. Just as the utility of a natural resource becomes utterly buried in the virtualization of commodity exchange, the reality of the society becomes enframed and enshrouded in the subtle power of the medium and the producer. The camera does not show the full reality of some geographically distant moment, the production process changes the image, filtering, fixing, and distorting it to increase commodity fetishism. The voiceover, underscore, cut shots, lensing, panning; all the techniques of compelling media distort reality into a virtual that the spectator controls without having any power. The movement to a new television station, to a new job, or a new home, is not an action that causes any change, precisely because any alternation of experiences, mediated in advance, became homogenous in their automation.

Debord’s criticism extends to the bureaucracy in American politics, the false consciousness of Leninist dictatorship, and the anarchist’s reinterpretation of Hegel. In this way, he represents an innovative approach to the communist ideology, willing to look at anarchist, communist, and libertarian predecessors as revelatory but fallible. This approach continues in contemporary discourses of collectivist mysticism, relinquishing entirely the notion of a concretized proletariat and bourgeoise. Instead, these two forces of social progress that collide repeatedly to produce socioeconomic evolution. On the one side, the bourgeois mechanization paradigm automates division, rationalization, isolation, and deterrence, giving primacy to the image, aggregating it for the masses in a society of the spectacle. On the other side, the proletariat machination paradigm reveals this loss of reality, patiently awaiting the phase of society in which automation turns into liberation. Meanwhile, this force of social progression continues to learn from mechanization everything that machination requires to overcome bureaucratic socialism.

This phase-space of the imaginary real, or the realist virtualization, begs multiple questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology. The postmodern communism axiomatizes these in advance, drawing from the dualism and dialectic of German Idealism. Descartes distrusts the real to prioritize the imaginary, making the images of mathematic and logical constructs primary. Kant obscures the dichotomy of mind and matter by placing the complete power of virtualization in the mind. Hegel takes the virtualization as a homogenous totality, in which the particularized portion contains the universalized reality of the whole. Mind and matter, phenomena and noumena, spirit and history, bourgeois and proletariat; then, at last, Spectacle and Society. In every dichotomy the division placed by the Observer mediates the image of the real. To admit that virtualization leaves no distinction, that action, objectivity, and responsibility may resume freely is more troublesome than a belief in sinister machination; better to have a real enemy to resist than to realize a sentiment of powerlessness stems from an actual absence of active power.

The mechanization automates into virtualization, stratifying the real into planes of observation. The radical empiricist may axiomatically declare the incompatibility of these pluralistic universes of discourse, content to leave each specialization on its own branch. The radical rationalist will axiomatically declare that single theory of everything will treat these branches as false, distortions of universality, the rational is the real. To the transdisciplinary observer, each argument falls flat. The emergence of one strata from that of another, the presence of continuous irreducibility of rational forms emerging from subterranean chaos and contributing to macroeconomic power-law constants; the empirical gives a space to look, the rational gives us a time at which our probability density will peak.

The isolation of a mind within an imaginary, mediated by invasive ideology, reproduces an automated society of the spectacle, but this production process predates recorded civilization. Those who fear responsibility cannot cope with a meaningless death or a meaningless life; they gladly coordinate together to produce an immense pageantry, a matrix of false consciousness, to entangle the fiction so comprehensively that it becomes inescapable. Whether a monastery or a political movement, ideology privileges the believer ahead of time. Three primary machinations result in a society of the spectacle. First, the reliance on images as instruments of expression prioritizes instrumentalism itself, making utility and functionalism the only standard of value. Second, the experience of the image prior to any event creates a predetermined meaning for any really lived experience. Third, the alienation of the spectator forces their passive access to commodity fetishism to increasingly rely on reproduction of entire narrative roles. The shortcoming of every utopian, collectivist, eternality, and universalization ideology is its inability to anchor the virtual within the real power-law dynamic of the cosmos; the progression is unconscious and cyclical, the mind is material, death is necessary to life, and the cosmos itself is a capitalist system.

Phenomenology of Stockpiles

November 18, 2017Leave a comment

Before we stare into the postmodern abyss, we should complete our analysis of technology and its essence; that is, its existential conceptual universalization. For this, we must turn to Martin Heidegger, who claimed that the machination of technological progress and its accompanying mechanization of life turns every living being into stockpiled resources, mechanical means to an uncertain end. The speciesism implicit in humanistic ideology left philosophy at a loss once animal and slave labor no longer played a role in the most effective economies of the world. For Heidegger, this reveals the insufficient expression of will-to-power across human form-of-life. The essence of being will never emerge from humanistic existential self-negation.

Heidegger saw in Germany the progression of technology into bureaucracy, disenchantment, and fascism. In response to the removal of meaning and significance, the need to generate subjective meaning independent of society and the State became the imperative of human life. Autocratic regimes performing genocide of arbitrary scapegoats is the consistent result of socialistic centralization. Reliance on a higher power, whether for objectivity or purpose, creates its own subjection. Losing their will to self-responsibility, socialization of meaning results in moral insolvency of individuals, then moral bankruptcy. Whether political subjection, spiritual asceticism, or conformity to THEY, through consumerism and spectacle, the intelligent being who fails to generate meaning out of their own experience of becoming-in-the-world inevitably falls into inauthenticity and suicide.

The mechanization of dualism was the same movement as the development of totalitarian idealism. Descartes escaped from the moral responsibility unending war and brutality by separating mind from body, leaving the use of each body permissible – responsibility for slavery, carnism, and war avoids recognition through stoic detachment. Kant escaped from the moral responsibility of choices that carry consequences by crystalizing this dualism even further. The realm of the thing-in-itself required a duty of egalitarianism at the expense of the entire phenomenal plane. Space, time, and bodies are all illusions; choice, consequences, and individual merit are productions of the mind. Kant’s moral bankruptcy results in a total loss of objectivity; just another system of inequalities, based on the comprehensive negation of life and meaning, again results in depravity, corruption, bureaucracy, carnism, slavery, and war. The last step in this progression spawns Hegel, who loses any pretense of objectivity or concern for life, again anointing idealistic hierarchy and war instead of freedom, value, and significance.

This placed philosophy in a terrible position. To regain objectivity necessitated an increasing belief in mechanical determinism and materialist history. To regain meaning necessitated an increasing romanticism of our sentimental, subjective, perceptual flux and emotional chaos. Once determinism, forgiven of any moral responsibility by Descartes and Kant, moved into rationalized sciences, philosophical materialism narrowed its attention to the interplay of historical forces, diminishing further the importance of any life or the Earth; when war is the only mechanism of progress, individual freedom, choice, value, and significance depreciate. Meanwhile, increasing romanticism results in further emotional rebellion; continuous movement without objective action. Philosophies of meaning progressively abandoned the attempt to take meaningful action, leaving positivism, structuralism, and pragmatism to their own pluralistic, pervasive doubt of knowledge, communication, or causal agency. We cannot feel surprised by the insanity that results from the fantasies of FreudoMarxian depersonalization. The “perpetual flux of stratified assemblages, ordered by the Body Without Organs” inspires rational revolt. This sad reaction to the absurd abyss at which we realize our total responsibility becomes a circus of values in its escape; we have the epistemology we deserve.

For Heidegger, the essence of a semiotic sign is more than its rhizomatic tracing through pluralistic matrices. Essence is the universality of the sign as a form, an aspect of being that transcends time and experience. Technology remains lost between mechanization and machination; its pervasive influence continues to spread and entrap the individual through technique, tools, means, and ends:

“To posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum.”

– Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Mechanization paradigms generate systems of inequality through principles, anchoring technological acceleration in favor of partisan gradations of value. Technology, if an independent partisan entity, is a contrivance that reinvents everything by a standard of instrumentalism. Because technology and technique are fundamentally human endeavors, this becomes tautological. To say that the utility of utility proves itself in its increase of utility says nothing new, only that acceleration, growth, and expansion are core elements of human success, precisely because these are emergent power-laws of anything that gains material complexity to survive against entropy and chaos. Growth rationalizes the intended consequences of inequality, which is to raise the virtuosity of capital rather than the worker. Technology provides equalization of process independent of human volition by means of an aggregation of generalized systemic liquidity. However, the socioeconomic systems that produce this technology constantly degrade technological validity through collective action. Impatient with the pace of progress for the baseline standards of living, socialism attempt to correct the emergent inequality of equal rights, preferring centralized control of unequal treatment. Because the idealist visions of an ordered and orchestrated society are incompatible, mechanization of economy becomes mechanization of sociopolitical panopticism. Out of this duplicity, more machination paradigms emerge, generating their system of values as a rejection of those with power at the time, pointing to aggregate unintended consequences. Because the mechanization paradigm never purifies itself and the machination paradigm attacks the symptom rather than the disease, the system falls into learned helplessness; bureaucracy, stagnation, and entropy result.

Just as early modern metaphysics failed to reveal the truth of being, life, and consciousness, its artificial prioritization of human, male, race, and class caused epistemology to fail in understanding instrumentalism. For Heidegger, the system of inequalities creates a paradigm that cannot reveal the truth of technology. Namely, that the essence of technology is the enframing and stockpiling of energy, forced from the Earth, held for a future purpose. Workers and resources become “stockpiled” as a means to a later end, but this purpose remains unknown, continuously displaced. Instrumentalism turns all beings into instruments of becoming. Unless someone argues that technology itself has a purpose of its own, a purpose to which we remain woefully ignorant, our progress will continue to leave us alienated as stockpiled instruments of future beings.

Of course, this is precisely what adults do through socioeconomic behavior; we stockpile time, energy, and resources in any form we can for the support of our own future, the future of our children, and for those with the wealth to do so, as many generations of human civilization that we can afford to improve. Indeed, we must take up moral responsibility for the end goal of this stockpiling, establishing it upon a system of meaning, or we will displace the guilt and anxiety of machination indefinitely. The danger begins when we miraculate our anxiety toward our own teleological stockpiling into a causa prima for religious, political, or social mechanization.

“The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the hiddenness of standing-reserve. Human activity can never directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it.” – Ibid

Heidegger’s analysis of instrumental machination shows that that mechanization is a method of enframing, we entrap meaning within an ordered framework out of anxiety toward our own finitude of orchestration. Technology reveals the potential of nature by means of capital, society, and science that relies upon system builders orchestrating the majority. The natural energy impossible to the individual is then entrapped within an artificial order of stock-piled energy. When this instrumentalism is miraculated as first-cause, this energy revelation expands to include the rationalization of every living being, in accordance with a destiny; unfortunately, it is a destiny no one yet realizes. The greatest danger of technology is that our increased certainty of probable outcomes exhausts the possibility of meaning, while hiding the essence of being in a stockpiled network of means without an end.

Heidegger later made a claim that philosophy as practiced is dead because THEY (the rabble, the spectacle) aligned existentialism too much with humanism rather than being-in-itself as an expression of will-to-power. As our analysis will show, the clear answer to claims of machination and the moral bankruptcy of mechanization requires a restoration of equality, objectivity, and responsibility. To avoid the depravity of instrumentalist systems of inequality, we must build our paradigm without the foolish speciesism that brings about the Biopolitics of fascism and communism. This means that our duality is on the side of life as it balances and conquers entropy. A morality of will-to-power ought to treat animal, alien, and machine life as an intelligent end, wherein minimum viable resilience is our means.

Life-process versus entropy; this will indeed anchor our valuations, though philosophers have taken this exposure to the equality of “bare” life with extremes of hope and desperation. We draw this line, between the life-process as an open system and the the entropy of its material hardware; entropy as the gravity that life is struggling to overcome. Looking to Heidegger’s predecessors, will find this life-against-entropy dualism has partisan affects; a clear division arises between the pessimistic virtualization of Schopenhauer and the affirmative nihilism of Nietzsche. This partisan separation continues into the French post-structuralists and contemporary American pragmatism, though each repeatedly lose themselves in Marxist ideology. Dividing reality into will-in-itself versus perpetual flux continues to result in mystic subjectivism or violence romanticism, yet each are integrally pessimistic.

Postmodern Decoherence

November 18, 2017Leave a comment

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Expansive mechanization and automation of any system pursues progressive acceleration as a teleonomic goal, increasing efficiency of predictably effective patterns of behavior through reproducibility. Acceleration of proven virtuosity through mechanization and automation also increases the rate at which opportunities for new experiments will occur. Technological progress thereby necessarily implies that some of those workers most proud of their struggle to attain virtuosity will find offense in their mechanical replacement. It also implies that some changes will only become imaginable once new generations arise with an utterly revolutionary system of values, allowing a paradigmatic shift to occur. We cannot, however, claim that there is no standard by which we may judge the perpetual flux of information across subjective, pluralistic systems of values. As Thomas Sowell elucidates in his several works, the emergent migration of peoples, practices, and beliefs reveal a macroeconomic standard of value that is quite consistent; humanity pursues freedom, mobility, security, and wealth through cooperative self-interest and self-interested cooperation. Only the philosopher that isolates their theories from the reality of human existence can ignore that peoples do everything in their power to adopt any tool, apparatus, machine, or practice that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of securing the necessities of human survival. This method of expanding reduction of anxiety defies any bureaucratic measures put in place to stop it, even when people must undermine the national ideology of must break the law to do so, as in Lenin’s soviet Russia.

Acceleration has exponentially increased human populations and improved the average standard of living. It is irrational sentimentalism when a philosopher like Berardi opposes technology, acceleration, or wealth “for its own sake” because these are never the purpose of progressive economic mechanization. Certainly, there are unintended consequences when aggregated historically, tempting the spectator to judge the merits of rhizomatic narratives ad post hoc. However, the “quest for cosmic justice” inspired by any deontological approach exacerbates irrational sentiment into an accumulation of insanity.

From Kant to Rawls, a forced sense of altruism and envy replace aggregate self-interested cultivation, to the detriment of freedom, value, and significance. Placing equal laws in response to third-party effects, pollution, safety, transportation or communication infrastructure, and military is very different from inventing a plethora of bureaucratic institutions that enforce speculative despotism.

The enclosure of the socialist autocracy as an internal deterrence machine is at the heart of French postmodern decoherence. In its entire approach, it requires a metaphysic of pessimistic virtualization. Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Baudrillard each employ the tools of suspicion originating with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, to reveal the machination of automated State mechanization. Unfortunately, due to the lack of constitutional sovereignty and equality before the law in their own nations, each of these quasi-communist authors found the libertarian acceleration of capitalist technology utterly inseparable from the bureaucratic machine of their own bloated government in France. In the process, a loss of objectivity leaves the post-structuralist outlook entirely nihilistic. To import and misapply these ideas in America shows how little some of our intellectuals understand of our libertarian constitution.

Machination Paradigms

November 8, 2017Leave a comment

The current mood in post-classical standard liberalism has broken America’s machinic virtualization morality along a partisan bipolarity. We are sprinting down Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, demonstrated in egalitarian-socialist economics, consumerist-egoism culture, and republican techno-bureaucratic democracy. The concretized gravity of a mechanization paradigm leaves behind many rhizomes. In tracing these, philosophers generate a negative system of values in reaction. In the acceleration and rationalization of mechanization, invention in aggregation often entails generalized unintended consequences. While mechanization accelerates the technological development of political economy, the choice between increasing liberty, energy, and action, or the cowardice of the opposite through bureaucracy, impediment, and empty movement, is independent from the velocity of economic production.

The socialist trend was thoroughly underway due to Eastern Europe’s jealousy of Western Europe, long before Marx forced socialist sentimentalism into a false choice between communist or fascist fulfillment. The end of mysticism, sexism, and slavery had begun through rise of industrial capitalism and global trade, but the lingering taste of the schizoid moralities created by Descartes, Kant, and Hegel were far more difficult to cleanse from the palate. In reaction to their generalized mechanization arose several theories of machination. Human cognitive psychology shows that performance of complex logic tests triples when we are catching a cheater. An identical logic problem, enframed within a narrative that allows the performers to catch a cheater, they far more easily solve than its abstract, formal equivalent. Grasping the abstractions of economic liberty become easily overpowered by conspiracy theories because our brain wires itself in favor of suspicion and unveiling.

Nietzsche showed in religious cultures the division of self-actualized, powerful, master morality, contrasted against reactive, vindictive, slave morality. Within our current phase, we may trace a secular polarity as well. There we find mechanization systems of value and machination systems of value. When the Judge-Priest turns upon the Magician-King, we must move not only beyond good and evil, but also beyond mechanization and machination. Heidegger’s assessment of technology, the search for its being-there or essence, represents the pragmatic ramifications of phenomenological mechanization:

“The jet aircraft and the high-frequency apparatus are means to ends […] Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is.”

– The Question Concerning Technology

This belief in concealment, of an invention remaining unseen as well as unintended, a trojan horse lurking in our midst; this is the essence of machination paradigm. This rise in suspicion and the disenchantment that followed create temporal stratifications, evidenced in the rhizomes. Modern philosophy through Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Adam Smith, and Freud reveals a belief in separation of “man” with a soul and “nature” as a machine; throughout these authors, we find belief in scientific progress, wealth through mechanization, and egoistic individualism. The new middle-class academics were profiting because of industrialism, economic liberalism, and democratic republics were accelerating the wealth and domination of Europe. However, many of them were profiting from violence and exploitation as well. Once the spread of mechanization paradigm imposed the presence of machines upon everyone, the mood began to change.

Karl Marx showed with precision that production machines within the factory represent alienate laborers from their products. This alienation was not only individual and concrete in each worker, but also systemic, abstract, and universal. The latter is essential, as Marxist materialism is Kant and Hegel’s mystic dualism combined with large-scale determinism. For Marx, when we conceptually aggregate production machines into a unity, the capitalist system contrives an exploitative machination. Production Machines and Abstract Machines are self-similar duplicitous inventions by which capitalism, as an invasive ideology, steals the surplus labor value and virtuosity of generalized craftsmanship. This alienation splits authentic concretized meaning into several fractals, none of which the craftsman could reclaim within the paradigm of capitalistic political economy.

The production machine increases efficiency, standardizes factory labor-time, and improves consistency of quality. This consistency embeds within the machine itself the virtuosity that once differentiated the hierarchy of craft guilds. Through technology, the machine is virtuous, while the laborer becomes little more than an observer.

“Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery […] set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”

– Karl Marx, Grundrisse – Fragment on Machines

The increased production capacity of industrial capitalism requires the reliance on currency as an abstract machine so that the over-abundant goods no longer travel to destinations for exchange. This instead occurs on the financial market. Whereas the production machine contains the surplus value of the general intellect, the currency machine contains the surplus value of product circulation: “The real costs of circulation are themselves objectified labour time – machinery for the purpose of abbreviating the original costs of circulation.” The universe of labor has virtuosity and opportunity under the control of machines, both material and abstract. Virtuosity itself, as acceleration and liquidity, becomes multiple abstract machines as well, through interplay of factory automation and financial automation.

The mechanized industrial factory removes the opportunity of expression for any skillful labor with an increasingly powerful machination of rationalized separation, dividing labor and treating the factory as the concretized unit of labor processes. The factory-machine generates flow from one production machine to another, with human labor little more than fuel and oil to keep the machine running. Once the production process becomes automated, the factory is a machine that only works when it breaks down; that is, from the humanist perspective, until the factory breaks down there is automation, no human work arises unless the machinist labors to restore the automaton.

The financial machine develops when bankers, merchants, and capitalists recognize that the circulation of coins with intrinsic value is too inefficient relative to the production capacity of the factories, especially at the scale of investment already underway in the mechanization process. Thus, two financial machines become increasingly powerful, the bank note (representing a potentially infinite quantity of currency without the need for concrete circulation) and the finance loan (accelerating the availability of capital for investment).

Marx’s conception of the machine generalizes the forms of invention that divide the laboring class. Generalized mechanization benefits the bourgeoisie while exploiting the surplus value of labor. Whether symbolic, intellectual, or industrial, mechanization produces inventions that enclose the technique and virtuosity of organic systems within an artificial, inorganic construct. This generalization creates the basis for a negative machination paradigm, according to which any decision that accelerates or expands political economy necessarily does so at the expense of the proud and virtuous laborers. In the primitive commune, the baker with extra bread may trade or eat it. In the industrial factory, the wage-earner takes home currency possessed of no intrinsic value and cannot afford either the products of labor or the essentials of life.

However, the concretized alienation of particularized workers had its axiomatization ahead of time, from Bentham, Ricardo, and Smith, anchoring the system of inequalities found within utilitarian capitalism. The end justifies the means in such political economy. Small pockets of precarious workers are an insufficient argument against an irrational paradigm. Marx bases arguments in the generalization of material idealism to fight the utilitarianism driving the alienation of capitalism. The machination sentiment glorifies older forms of destitution against new forms.

Machination paradigms aggregate the unintended consequences of mechanization, elucidating the essence of the precarious system of inequalities already in progress. This machination, once fully recognized, will inevitably lead to revolution. The rise of abstract machines of finance represents a machination against potential laborers driven by the capitalist. The bank note allows the capitalist or merchant to move without notice or unnecessary risk, or circulate currency simply by sending it by messenger or post. The acceleration of capital liquidity through the finance loan removes the necessity of laboring against raw materials prior to trade. The availability of financing makes colonialism and industrialism an attractive replacement for local labor, because an economic system may far more easily circulate currency and bank notes than populations of skilled workers.

The generalized alienation of labor, divorcing the class from its value creation, results not only from the enclosure of the virtuosity of skilled work within the machine and the factory, but also from the enclosure of the worker within the factory and industrial society. Marx has a specific machination paradigm based on the displacement of blue collar jobs, skilled workers who can no longer connect their identity with the value they create.

“The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.”

– Karl Marx, Grundrisse – Fragment on Machines

Marx finds the machination implied in mechanization as that which entire virtuosity of the craftsman within the machine, generalized and reproduced as simulacra. Each new machine further divides labor and alienates the skilled class of society, creating a vicious cycle. The original virtuosity of a wooden furniture carpenter, for example, becomes replaced by an entire chair factory in which no skill or creativity gains expression from the worker. The extensive job specialization required to continue the expansion of capital creates the capacity for managers, engineers, and scientists to improve upon the machines and factories, who then also become exploited. mechanization becomes a cycle that perpetuates itself until the general intellect and virtuosity of craft completely diverge. The workers earn a wage to operate machines that no longer enclose their virtuosity, but invalidate it as inferior. The knowledge production systems of the general intellect likewise receive salary but no share in the capitalist application. Engineers apply the general intellect, selling their craft to the capitalist who will reproduce the machine ad infinitum. This becomes overproduction, so that the State displaces the surplus value produced into additional general science, engineering, and technology, including education and research grants, uses tax incentives to push consumer confidence, or displaces the industrial into the military, allowing surplus productive capacity to generate self-destructive products (weapons, death of the working-class soldier).

Max Weber saw machination in the bureaucratic machine of capitalist rationalization. Although the division of labor increases freedom and wealth, it diminishes the possibility of meaningful work and certainty of social standing. Because bureaucratic capitalism divides labor into narrowly-defined roles, the values of societal rationalization lie at the level of the system, not the practitioner. While the majority will gain a higher standard of living, the intended utilitarian consequence of mechanization, the individual becomes a producer-consumer.

Alienated and disenchanted, the only meaning available lay within consumerism, which further encloses the individual:

“The idea of a man’s duty to his possessions, to which he subordinates himself as an obedient steward, or even as an acquisitive machine, bears with chilling weight on his life. “

– The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The factory production system, bureaucratic machine, and acquisition ideology all place the individual in a position stripped of value, meaning, or significance. Once destined upon a path, there is no escape. The intended consequence of industrial capitalism was to harness individual rational self-interest in aggregate, so that the economy will produce generalized economic welfare. For Weber, the social machine concealed a greater machination than the system of inequality pushing capital into the hands of finance and speculation.

It was precisely because the self-representative state reveals its own lack of an intrinsic motivation that efficiency of the mechanism becomes harnessed by the whim of the plutocracy. It is the political economy machine that continues itself, with an intrinsic origination and purpose long forgotten, that becomes susceptible to self-destruction. This quickly expands in a vicious cycle, as governance displaces progressively more representative sovereignty into bureaucratic regimes of planning centralization. The engine of socialism replaces libertarian democratic representation with comprehensive diffusion of responsibility.

At scale, the aggregated ordering of bureaucracy promotes moves an economic system further toward rationalization and ascetic vocationalism. Weber saw in Marx a short-sighted and narrow view of political economy, because bureaucracy is an invasive ideology that is irreversible. Enclosure of technique applies technological improvement to tools, apparatus, and machines:

“Tools” are those aids to labor, the design of which is adapted to the physiological and psychological conditions of manual labor. “Apparatus” is something which is “tended” by the worker. “Machines” are mechanized apparatus.

– Weber, Economy and Society

Weber looks more broadly, applying each form of acceleration. The worker desires better hammers and the soldier better swords, but only the state apparatus can harness the war machine to create a permanent, centrally planned, political economy. These three methods of technological development place the worker in a distinct relationship, but this relationship also repeats in fractal patterns at any level of observation. The improvement of the tool centers upon the practitioners and their virtuosity and effectiveness. The apparatus mechanizes the virtuosity and accelerates the efficiency of the process, displacing the skilled worker in favor of cheap labor that the capitalist can exploit. Finally, more complex, and more powerful, systems of machines attain automation, combining to displace even the precarious wage-earner, leaving a handful of janitors and engineers to passively monitor the machines.

This process repeats in the bureaucratic machine of the government and the economic system as well. Currency and taxation introduce acceleration of debt, centered on the needs of those with wealth. These were the original tools of commerce, communication, and power between the monarch and the landed aristocracy. The rise of a merchant and industrial bourgeoise (a “new money” upper middle class) de-regulates the value of currency and the State apparatus now gains center stage. Acceleration of capital liquidity and the policing of inequality arise to preserve the system of inequalities. As Hayek would later note, the essential problem of bureaucracy is the passage of laws without legislative consensus. The democratic representatives create governmental decision-making groups they have displaced powers beyond democratic oversight. The State apparatus thereby produces its own vicious cycle of parasitic growth rather than equality before the law, outside the control of the electorate. Generating an ever-increasing diffusion of responsibility, the impossibility of equal rights before the universal applicability of legislative justice forces attention onto the inequality of outcomes instead.

Finally, the automation of the rationalizing capitalist system results in the social machine that entraps every member as cogs within its bureaucracy:

“Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action […] superior to every kind of collective behavior and also any social action opposing it. Where administration has been completely bureaucratized, the resulting system of domination is practically indestructible.”

Max Weber, Economy and Society

Note the contrast between the mechanization paradigm that divides life along arbitrary lines of inequality. The machine had no soul, so entrapping a woman in a marriage with any rights, appropriating resources from colonial control over “savage” natives, completing scientific experimentation on the poor, vivisection, eating any animal desired, slave-labor, and the destruction of ecological systems were all justified. Western “Man” had a bourgeois mind-soul that ruled over his machine, everyone else more closely approached an instrument. Once society progress toward democratic socialism, only machinations become meaningful. The collective organism loses all objectivity. Rather than dealing with concretized forms-of-life, the state apparatus becomes a social machine that concerns itself only with itself. The law is no longer for its people, but for the lawyers, bureaucrats, and social workers.

At this stage, the machine is no longer a mere tool, it gains a crucial point of reference. There is no other contender, because reliance on slaves, animals, and skilled workers for labor proves inefficient by comparison. The system of inequalities given by early modern philosophy now shifts upward, toward the State apparatus. Where the law and rationalization once emerged as a tool of the social contract, aristocracy, or monarch, population density drives rationalization of the codes. Moving from government as a tool, wielded by those with axiomatized power, it transitions to an apparatus that is powerful but needs representatives to “tend to” its functions rather than making laws; this is a critical step in the emergence of bureaucracy and national death.

The apparatus of the mechanized State requires humans to “push its pedals” at the right time, like an early industrial loom, but the virtuosity of governance becomes increasingly automated, placing humans in a passive role before bureaucratic machine. This requires an immense source of mechanical power; power that remains external but contains no purpose or identity of its own. Deteriorating the energy of the social body, the State apparatus seeks new forces of acceleration and couples itself to the energy of the War Machine. As Deleuze & Guattari describe, the State appropriates the War Machine in the form of generalized terror, generalized brutality, the police state, and the army, but the War Machine exists prior to and outside of the State.

We can take Hobbes and Karl von Clausewitz quite literally if we provide an internal limit to their claims: once bureaucratic mechanization becomes automated, the State is only comprehensible as an interruption and a temporary suspension of the universal flow of absolute war, the war of all against all. Through the disenchantment of the people and the diffusion of responsibility throughout the representatives, the only way to prevent anarchy is to appropriate its energy. The State apparatus does not prevent the War Machine from tearing down the socioeconomic scaffolding of society, but internalizes it. The warriors, rebels, barbarians, and criminals are axiomatized into automation of its bureaucratic fabric. Before turning to outright dictatorship, the State remains an apparatus that still requires “tending to” by means of the War Machine. The State needs police brutality, military deployment, and terrifying incarceration as the appropriation of a remainder, balancing the equation of order, orchestration, security, and organization. This displacement and re-territorialization provides the energy for additional bureaucratic, not economic, growth.

Three problems emerge along with the generalized threat of the War Machine, which the State apparatus employs to convince society that any disruption of progressive bureaucratic rationalization will totally unravel the nationalist political economy. First is dehumanization; mechanical rationalization requires that individuals re-program their natural rhythms to meet the standardized cadence of mechanized synchronization. Second is mobilization; the State apparatus drives collusion and sponsored monopoly, assisting protected capitalists in the militarizing of rationalization. Third is disenchantment, because the State apparatus progressively strips the both the social body and the body of Earth of its natural liberty, resources, and power, survival and information increase at the expense of meaning and beauty.

Dehumanization

The first problem that emerges with the State’s generalized threat of the War Machine is the dehumanization of the social body and the individual body, re-territorializing all values within the centralized schedule of political economy. Rationalization requires that individuals re-program their natural rhythms to meet the standardized cadence of mechanical synchronization. In a populist effort to protect favored laborer groups from the acceleration of technological evolution and displacement of jobs, democratic socialism takes control of both the capitalist and the laborer. Rather than loosening the restrictions on work or increasing the generalized well-being of those in transition, bureaucratic rationalization appropriates both the increased industrial effectiveness from the capitalist and the dehumanization of the worker, turning an increasingly ordered and orchestrated social body toward nationalistic goals.

Dehumanization is not an inherent property of capitalism, but an intrinsic attribute of the State apparatus once bureaucratic rationalization begins socializing both capital liquidity and labor liquidity for its own ends. Because the State apparatus centralizes the cadence of synchronization, it must orchestrate the flows of artificial codes of political economy through an ever-larger government of specialized bureaus. This increasingly establishes its codes based on the continuous performance of the machines of finance, industry, politics, and war. Human life and every other form-of-life play a diminishing role, entrapping all energy within the machine of the establishment. The capitalist no longer dehumanizes workers with direct technological demands. As described by Hayek, the State apparatus formalizes the inhumane into law through positive diffusion of responsibility to negatively arbitrary bureaucratic machines, making every depravity constitutional and legal, in the largest and most precise sense of these terms. This has immense implications for the entire ecological order that gave rise to the progress of society:

“The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines — in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is shorn of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm[…] in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, [rationalization] parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master.”

– Max Weber, Economy and Society

The biorhythms of intelligent primates that evolved for one context become entrapped within fixed cycle of light, work, and food that attempts erasure of the variations of daylight, seasons, and ecology. Rivers become redirected, swamps drained, lakes created by damns, rampant deforestation, insects, soil, and wildlife destroyed; every additional control mechanism added generated unintended consequences that require additional controls in response. The vicious cycle creates its own crises and thrives on the power-grab each crisis, especially war, allows.

Mobilization

The second problem that emerges with the State’s generalized threat of the War Machine is the mobilization of the entire economy according to war-time distributions of values. This is quite separate from a strong standing national military, which remains distinct from the decentralized decisions of the peace-time economy. Mobilization uses tariffs, special taxes, bureaucratic committees, centralized planning, nationalistic subsidies, and other incentives to remove the distinction between war-time control of the economic system and peace-time economic freedom. The State apparatus bribes the capitalists in this mechanization, militarizing bureaucratic rationalization. The soldier and slave, in the dual systems of military and slavery, are the two modes of organization best suited to political economy fully subjected to the State. In the mobilization-socialist phase-space of hyperactive industrial centralization, all the brilliance, creativity, and charisma that gave rise to the invention of better tools, apparatuses, and machines now serves the universal deterrence plan of the State apparatus. Deterrence is necessary externally and internally, because it relies heavily on the spread of polemical envy.

As Thomas Sowell wrote in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, “One of the ways in which the dogma of equal performance is a threat to freedom is in its need to find villains and sinister machinations to explain why the real world is so different from the world of its vision. […] Paranoia and freedom are an unlikely and unstable combination.” The State apparatus thrives on mobilization of war-time bureaucratic control through the increase of paranoia, envy, and machination paradigms. The great Nietzschean irony is that the glorification of socialist eternal war is that it requires a pervasive slave morality.

The inventions of capitalism under conditions of decentralized acceleration makes average labor-time lower, increasing the average standard of living. The waking time available to the worker for parenting, education, hobbies, and entrepreneurship should increase; but the pace of changes becomes a source of envy. The younger worker has the privilege of energy, ambition, and less engrained habits and opinions, while the older worker may become marginalized if they cannot adapt to the rapidly changing society. Rather than more effectively spreading time across the multiple requirements of life, adapting to the new demands of an accelerated society, the working class demands their demagogue peers protect them at the expense of economic progress. Bureaucracy grows exponentially, erodes the culture of creativity, then kills the possibility invention. Once the State apparatus fully rationalizes political economy in accordance with a cohesive paradigm, the social body stagnates.

The only way ensure centralized rationalization is to entrap every living being in a tangled mobilization of false wars, enslavement to the “war” on drugs, terror, etc. The nationalist socialism dictatorships known as communism and fascism are the ultimate outcome. The War Machine and the automated State machine are fully unified, a final centralization and enslavement that kills any additional progress. Even a minor return, along the way, to economic liberalism must fight against the sludge of bureaucratic friction that remains intact. Each new idea for improvement becomes increasingly impossible to actualize, and after a few generations the population emerges fully trained for their State mechanical enslavement.

Through indoctrination, socialization, and deterrence, the individuals within social body no longer possesses any values of its own. The energy created from youthful hope, courageous risk, and innovative ideas dwindles, causing the economy and emergence of culture to entropy. The same process of rationalization that ensured the growth of mechanization also prevents its additional development by isolating knowledge in fragmented specialization, increasing bureaucracy around the actualization of disruptive ideas, and universal interference against innovation, through tariffs, heavy taxation, and restricted immigration.

Disenchantment

The third problem that emerges with the State’s generalized threat of the War Machine is disenchantment. The increasingly large and bureaucratic State apparatus progressively removes any meaning or significance from the natural pursuit of the intelligent primate’s struggle for life. Certainty of survival increases, but centralization puts this security in place through deterrence rather than growth and deliberation; information, advertising, and propaganda become intertwined, at the expense of wonder, personal values, and mystery:

“As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything.”

– Max Weber, Economy and Society

Note that suppression of magic, wonder, and mysticism does not increase the capacity for intelligent consensus of the social body, but restricts all meaning, enclosing significance within the controls of the State apparatus. There remains an immense amount transcendental dualism, but it becomes centralized for the purposes of subjection. This centralization of meaning puts the State in the position of providing its own axiomatic justification.

Through medical bureaucracy, not only the danger but also the magic of childbirth becomes rationalized but disenchanted. Through industrial-economic bureaucracy, not only the danger but also the magic of agriculture and metallurgy becomes rationalized but disenchanted. Through juridico-political bureaucracy, justice and morality become increasingly codified and clarified, but also the magic of spiritual retribution and moral vindication becomes rationalized and disenchanted. This last element turns the State apparatus into a purveyor of cosmic justice at the hands of demagogues rather than the legal justice that predicated its constitution. Once a tool of the people, representative democracy displaces the responsibility of legislation further into socialist bureaucracy and further away from legitimacy, accountability, or significance.

At each step, the State apparatus must harness additional power from the War Machine, because it is taxing the power of the economy out of existence. This requires extensive centralization of control because the War Machine that the State apparatus appropriates is the negation of control. The War Machine is the nihilism of cultural entropy, the barbarous rejection of civilization. To channel this into the purposes of the State apparatus, wars, terror, and civil unrest must remain constant.

We should again take note that the military of a free society, external to the economic conditions of its people, preserves the national defense through external deterrence. The external aggregation of a War Machine in this form is consistent with equality before the law, constitutional sovereignty, and the preservation of a democratic republic. When mobilization and disenchantment combine to turn the War Machine inward, forcing private economic activity toward permanent internal deterrence and centralization, the State is no longer a distinct tool and the culture no longer recognizes the War Machine for what it truly represents. The State becomes an apparatus of enslavement, enclosing the War Machine within the society itself. What ought to remain outside the State and the People, as a tool for the deterrence of external chaos becomes enmeshed for the deterrence of internal freedoms.

“There is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.”

– Max Weber, Economy and Society

The machination of the State apparatus arises as an unintended consequence of rationalization and disenchantment when visions of universals become backpropagated from the intelligentsia into the political system. The more that mechanization increases efficiency and smooths the flow of economic development, the larger the intelligentsia demands the bureaucracy become. When the bureaucracy gains prevalence over the mechanization, the energies of the social body congeal; slowing, glycating, and diminishing, which requires the State to continue escalation of centralized control especially over cultural signification. It creates holidays, times of remembrance, propaganda, political publicity, thematic policies, and finally war of international conquest in its effort to generate the significance continuously diminished by its own methods.

In this evolution, the State apparatus moves increasingly into panopticism as it automates the sociopolitical machine. The apparatus achieves aggregate internal deterrence in the spectacle of generalized voluntary surveillance. The machination of State mechanization, distinct from the private economic mechanization that it parasitized, emerges into a Socializing Machine. Arising from the disenchantment of the fully rationalized apparatus, the phase-space of the Socializing Machine enclose the political body by automating the flows of rationalized internal deterrence. The transitional phase first requires panopticism and spectacle, then turns to hegemonic simulation and simulacra. Two types of totalitarian mechanization may emerge: the weaponizing Machine, automating the techno-bureaucratic regime within nationalist socialism (fascism); or the fantasy Machine, automating the terror-determent regime through repressed internalization (communism). Each rely on the vision of a system of inequalities to anchor their cosmic justifications of cruelty, murder, rape, and slavery.

Mechanization Paradigms

November 8, 2017Leave a comment

The original mechanization paradigm developed during early modern philosophy, hoping to justify Protestantism, revolution, slavery, colonialism, and industrialism. Initially, this marks an externalization of the permanent schism inherent in Christianity; stoicism toward the world and its bodies, ascetic investment in the realm of the spirit. However, the separation of the pure mind-soul from the impure matter-body creates an Oedipalization of moral valuation-signification. By placing the system of values permanently out of reach, away from any human objectivity, the death of Platonic idealism results in a mechanization increasingly toward nihilism.

Rene Descartes begins the modern era of philosophy with the justification of systems of machines and their intrinsic moral inequalities built in:

“[Witness] the variety of movements performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry, and that with help of but few pieces compared with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal.”

These machines fabricated by human industry are twofold. On the one hand, the mechanization of economic production and on the other, its machination into specialists capable of secular innovation, including dissection and live vivisection, both animal and human. After this we see an increasing prevalence of philosophers who redefine the mind/body dualism in subtle ways based on the discoveries of science and the advances of technology, until today quantum mechanics, general relativity, super-intelligent computers, and network theory all become incorporated. To say that the materialism of Democritus, or the Idealism of Orphic Plato, represents receives vindication and victory in contemporary science, from the holographic to the simulation hypothesis, this belies a nonsensical attribution to past thought.

The inherent praise of complexity and intention throughout all systems of inequality, which may have some pragmatic merit when desperate for human species population growth, loses much of its objectivity once we feel we risk over-population. Religious systems have frequently dogmatized the best advice for health, sanitation, and political stability available to them, but their dedication to outdated information constantly puts them at odds with the needs of the time. In either case, we will find very few philosophers admitting that their system of inequalities is strategic rather than evident.

However, we find a hard delineation rather than admission of a continuous gradation in philosophers like Descartes and Kant. Saying that a human is an organized system makes it a machine designed with a soul. If soul, from the Greek psyche, were simply “the virtualization of speculative reality by the brain” we might return to a more gradual spectrum between the highly intelligent and the lowest intelligence. Instead, this frequently becomes combined with mysticism, bigotry, and religious violence. In resistance to the religious implications, others described this self-determination as nature, privileging the “natural” superiority of civilized man over the machines, animals, brutes, savages, etc. Again, if nature meant “the genetic code inherited to build the minimum viable reproduction of an organism” we might treat dogs, cats, and pigs very differently, as their stewards; the long-running prevalence of claims that God or Nature justify rape, castration, vivisection, enslavement, imprisonment, colonialism, and murder shows how the Cartesian invasive ideology brings us to disgrace.

Soul is the favored word of weakness and bureaucracy, always losing itself in dogmatic foolishness, while Nature is the confused word that implies fatalist destiny. In either case, the words conceal moral uncertainty and every utopian sentiment results in unintended consequences.

“Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention”

– Rene DeCartes

Descartes is content to ascribe the superiority of the European man to his Cristian God, blessing these inequalities with divine designation. After centuries of anti-Semitism and crusades against Islamic territories, which left Western civilization in a dull superstitious stupor, it took many more centuries for philosophy to recover fully from Christianity’s influence. The machines as they rose certainly help this progression.

Thomas Hobbes, for his part, believed that the State needed the same level of stability as the human body, but his belief in centralization reflected premature notions of the mind’s physiological control of the body. In our own era of democratic nationalism, we might draw a better analogy by saying that consciousness presides over the execution of some elements of the body’s political economy, but we frequently change this president without changing the character of the role. Since Hobbes was afraid of democratic overthrow of his monarchy, he wrote against this systemization. The history of democracy was not promising for political stability, in his defense. More importantly, Hobbes was searching for a moral refutation of the capacity for moral indictment of monarchical injustice. This is a crucial step in the separation of justice, morality, and religious ideology in philosophy.

Hobbes argues a nation-state could only maintain its order against the chaos of natural anarchy with the agency of a monarch. Without a state we will suffer through continuous civil war, a war of all against all. This conception of egoism will arise repeatedly. The body politic, to end this continuous civil war, establishes the social machine. Individuals give away their power to the social machine and enclose themselves within its protection. The body politic is the product of the social machine in Leviathan, analogous to an organism. Hobbes treats all men as equal in their natural state, because death equalizes the danger represented by others:

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; […] as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

The secret machination justifies the mechanization of any armed force necessary to protect the stability of the State. Rather than any emphasis on machines, Hobbes concerns himself only with imagination, and the inventions of men. While these arguments come after the enlightenment, the industrial revolution has not begun the slow evolution of conceptualization we will see in reaction to the rise of machines.

Rousseau, in defense of his theory of democracy and individualism, allows the lines of traditional society to blur, giving us the literary archetype of the “noble savage” and a more optimistic view of the state of nature, but he again privileges the freedom of intelligent human dominion over others:

“I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature hath given senses to wind itself up, and to guard itself, to a certain degree, against anything that might tend to disorder or destroy it. I perceive exactly the same things in the human machine, with this difference, that in the operations of the brute, nature is the sole agent, whereas man has some share in his own operations, in his character as a free agent.”

– Jean Jacque Rousseau, On the origin of inequality

With Rousseau, the justification of differences of rights lies in the capacity of the machine to resist its rules. Again, we see there is an immense gulf between the concept of a designed machine and a free will; only centuries of technological progress provide us with evidence that order can arise from chaos and chaos can arise from local rule-based order. It is an important theme throughout morality however, and Rousseau give it succinct expression for the first time. Morality is the capacity to ignore the rules of short-run patterns of behavior in favor of long-run accomplishment. Extrinsic payoff does not drive this exclusively, like objectivism’s rational self-interest, because compassion and holistic sentiment belies our self-narrative.

In contemporary retrospective, when we built more complex machines, especially computers, we finally saw how overly simplistic we were in the supposition of simple determinism by nature versus free will of consciousness to directly override nature. To anyone knowledgeable of contemporary science, the last century has continued to remove fatalism from nature, destroying the grounds for materialism and racism simultaneously. Education, environment, motivation, nutrition, and some genetic traits all contribute to the superior virtuosity of a charismatic leader, cello player, or physicist. Language, expectation, and privilege play a vital role. Complexity of ideas and the security felt toward uncertainty are issues of nurture, not nature. Stability, language, complexity, and specialization in political economy allow these “higher” elements to arise today. Wealth was the only sign of security in early modern political philosophy.

Consider for instance what an “invention” it was in Hobbes’ conception of the political body, and the recognition that specialization allows the nation-state to divide labor, increase efficiency, and manage trade. The invention of machines is central to the progress of division of labor, which becomes later articulated by Adam Smith at the beginning of the industrial revolution:

“The invention of all those machines by which labour is so much facilitated and abridged, seems to have been originally owing to the division of labour.”

– The Wealth of Nations

The social contract philosophers lay the groundwork for a comprehensive mechanization paradigm. Rousseau held a superficial view of intelligence, but criticizes Hobbes for holding the strict egoist view of human motivation. It is in the elucidation of compassion as a moral virtue, that we find it in more than one species, that begins our look outward to children, foreigners, and other mammals for guidance on the injustice of tyrannical government. It is striking that he took the steps of equalizing all mammals in death, mourning, anxiety, and empathy, but leaves this mammalian morality secondary to the self-conscious intelligence that allows humans the machination against their own short-run interests.

“There is another principle which has escaped Hobbes; which, […] tempers the ardour with which he pursues his own welfare, by an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow-creature suffer. […] One animal never passes by the dead body of another of its species: there are even some which give their fellows a sort of burial; while the mournful lowings of the cattle when they enter the slaughter-house show the impressions made on them by the horrible spectacle which meets them.”

– On the origin of inequality…

However, Rousseau’s analysis never extends beyond equality among European men, because he only wants moral justification of democratic revolution and the legitimacy of warfare and murder to secure equality. We should note that the text has inspired two lines of thought that remains in contemporary political criticism. On the one hand, Rousseau’s arguments for the capacity of citizens to apply rational morality in judgement against the state’s system of justice gave inspiration to the evolution of classical liberalism that followed. On the other hand, his sentiments combine with Marxism in France in a more anarchist manner that we will find significant in post-structuralism.

“All the inequality which now prevails owes its strength and growth to the development of our faculties and the advance of the human mind, and becomes at last permanent and legitimate by the establishment of property and laws. […] it is plainly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that children should command old men, fools wise men, and that the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life.” Ibid

We see a continuation of support for inequality of aliens, animals, and slaves in John Locke. Women likewise, while receiving natural rights, do so secondary to the rights of men. The treatment or moral inequalities in Second Treatise of Government remains in contemporary governance, as the 15^th amendment leaves involuntary servitude permissible in our current system of incarceration. This is a triumph over the rampant hereditary servitude perpetuated in Western history for more than 10,000 years.

However, in the context of a rampant African slave trade and colonialism, Locke’s arguments aided the arguments for enslavement based on race for centuries to come. He later expresses in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that animals possess emotional awareness but he makes certain that avoidance of cruelty on behalf of animals, but only indirectly. Harming property harms the owner’s pursuit of happiness.

It is in the works of Hume that we finally see the machine taking hold of philosophical conceptualization. Hume possesses an extreme skepticism, but between the lines we find his honesty toward uncertainty and pragmatism for what to do about uncertainty itself. Likewise, the ramifications of methodological naturalism, early modern science, and the predominance of the machine in industrialized society come to fruition. Unfortunately, Hume was too polarizing for most to embrace then and gained notoriety primarily through Kant.

The ramifications of a machine that behaves according the rules of deterministic physical reality at one “level” but somehow produces self-conscious reflection and free choice at another remains difficult to grasp. To do so, we end up in the qubit code in which space-time has no bearing. However, each escape we allow, any denial and simplification, prevents understanding machinic virtualization and agency. This in turn produces a morally repugnant allowance of inequalities under false pretenses. The dogmatic separation of animal, machine, and human intelligence in science and philosophy is meaningless sophistry to Hume.

Hume attempts to give us as the highest good the libertarian stoic, who is a creative scientist, free thinker, and system builder. Rational citizens democratically and rightfully follow the critical leadership of the System Builder, becoming machines for the mechanization of the system. So long as the followers complete their subjection to a leader base on the merit and vision of the person and the system, Hume feels satisfied that the inequality of conduct has justification. Virtuosity should be the justification of inequalities, rather than money, religion, or lineage:

“Like many subordinate artists, employed to form the several wheels and springs of a machine: Such are those who excel in all the particular arts of life. He is the master workman who puts those several parts together; moves them according to just harmony and proportion; and produces true felicity as the result of their conspiring order.”

– The Stoic 6, Mil 149

This leaves open the larger problem of how far a system builder ought to feel privileged in mechanizing, though he handles this elsewhere. The functional harmony of specialized, divided, organized machines has its own beauty to Hume. In this conceptualization of leadership, Hume becomes the perfect model of arborescence in every topic he touches. Describing the ability of the emotions to distort the clarity of understanding in the mind:

“The least exterior hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine.”

– Of the Standard of Taste

Order is beauty, while disorder is disruptive. Freedom of representational democracy must have in its means and ends a level of social stability, or else society has no justification. Skepticism toward metaphysical ideals of injustice, combined with scientific approach to a logically ordered system, lead him to speak frequently of the “political machine” that receives orderly conduct through continuous self-maintenance against mysticism, corruption, and despotism:

“Rust may grow to the springs of the most accurate political machine, and disorder its motions.”

– Idea of a perfect commonwealth

Hume makes a clear distinction between the systems of representation and the machines that display order. This is both materially and politically self-similar for him. In general, he considers anything behaving in accordance with apparent causality and physicality, a machine. He considers any disorder a breakdown of the machine. Loss of functionalism becomes thereby our criterion for judgement of patterns of behavior.

The perpetual flux of perception contains objects that we sense in an uninterrupted succession. Why this virtualization feels so complete remains unknowable; “the power or force, which actuates the whole machine” is one we will never perceive, because lies outside the boundaries of perception. Hume’s statement expresses hard agnosticism that does not fit with the rest of his optimistic methodological naturalism.

When tackling this metaphysical element of cosmology, Hume again returns to probability and emergence, as the cosmos is a machine of machines of machines behaving according to rules:

“You will find [the cosmos] to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain.”

– Hume Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

In general, Hume’s employment of the machine as a metaphor gives it a glorified status, whereby events that interrelate predictably and with high probability are mechanical, and therefore beautiful. We may paraphrase and elaborate his expression. The cosmic machine emerges from galaxy machines, which emerge from astronomical machines, which emerge from molecular machines, which emerge from atomic machines, which emerge from quantum machines. This is the contemporary suspension of disbelief we maintain in methodological naturalism. Humanity is a complex biological machine at both individual and species level, witnessing the perpetual flux between the molar and molecular. The axiomatization of machinic theory is therefore essential to the sciences. Through purposeful uncertainty of conclusions, we have in the past two centuries taken immense steps forward in predictions of probability, at levels of observation Hume might barely have imagined.

As a system of inequalities, Hume best summarizes the ethics of moral machines unintentionally, in a footnote: “That the lighter machine yield to the heavier, and, in machines of the same kind, that the empty yield to the loaded; this rule is founded on convenience.” Convenience of machinic size and weight, rules that produce yielding to superior gravity, energy, and complexity to produce flow, this becomes the first honest analysis of hierarchy; because, “societies of men are absolutely requisite for the subsistence of the species; and the public convenience, which regulates morals, is inviolably established in the nature of man and of the world, in which he lives.”

Found in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, these statements provide a groundwork for a morality of acceleration, expansion, and growth. This is the height of Mechanization paradigm an idealistic statement, but the logic underlying it was too far-fetched without the scientific discoveries that have since vindicated it. Combined with scientific advances, capitalism, and the digital age, this prioritization of flow feels comfortable to a contemporary technologist. The question that remains, if we accept the preservation of the human species through the ordering of Earth, we must develop the ethics by which we judge the unintended consequences of mechanization. A true science of ethical ideal is necessary, not based on consensus, but based on vision for a better future for all life. When technology alienates, and production destroys, we must analyze the boundary at which short-run mechanization re-territorializes into long-run machination. Miraculating the symbolic, capital, is not the answer.

For now, we may continue the philosophical evolution of the moral machines produced by the social machines. Based on our distinction, consciousness recognizing itself as causal agent results in the moral creativity of the System Builder. The System Builder is feel the system of representations leave consciousness liberated to machinic agency in the development of new systems of representation. In contrast, consciousness recognizing itself as machinic effect of another system of representation entraps itself. The System Builder employs the symbolic order to gain Quantum Liberty, even without proof of freedom. Those who are subjected, even when free of dominated objectification, are machines who self-enslave without proof of power over them. The system that liberates itself to build new systems of values places the power of purpose intrinsic to its own system, the machine enslaves itself through belief in its enslavement to other machines producing it; social, ideological, biological, and metaphysical.

This distinction provides a new addition to the definition of morality; the essence of morality is the will to adhere to a symbolic rule that prioritize long-run realization of the system of values over the short-run desires of the machines. We will find that the problem remains discursive. When John Locke and Adam Smith combine the System Builder with utilitarianism, this anchors a moral justification for the inequalities of economic liberalism and constitutional democracy. When Nietzsche combines the System Builder with aristocratic egoism and evolutionary racism, this anchors a moral justification for the inequalities of fascism and nationalistic socialism. When Marx combines the System Builder with the virtuosity of fraternal craftsmanship, this anchors a moral justification for the inequalities of dictatorial communism. In a Theocracy, God is the only System Builder, nominally. From Xenofeminism, we find prophecy of total upheaval by an artificial superintelligence aligned the feminine mystique. In each of these cases, we see that, while political economic, ethics, and science are part of a feedback loop with personal morality, the moral systems of individuals anchor new feedback loops for the evolution of the social machine.

Agency Dilemma, Bureaucracy, and Dictatorship

November 7, 2017November 8, 2017Leave a comment

Agency Dilemma occurs when the person with the power to take action is distinct from the two parties with a stake in the exchange. While contemporary Behavioral Economics provides a more realistic understanding of these parties, this reality is nevertheless a level playing field if individuals remain unrestricted their natural freedom of voluntary exchange. We may add to the classical theory of economics that the real individuals in the market are habit-driven, quasi-rational, and normatively bounded in their self-interested exchanges. What remains true, however, is that better outcomes occur when the least amount of Agency Dilemma is present. What also remains true is that Agency Dilemma is multiplicative, developing a bureaucracy that spreads like a cancer in the social body, removing its will to live.

America is losing its objectivity, not due to subjectivity or pluralism, but due to the invasive ideology of the egalitarian-bureaucratic machine. The agency dilemma multiplies geometrically, creating unnecessary complexity and total slowdown of action, even when movement is high.

The depravity of agency dilemma degrades three critical sources of objectivity:

Causal Agency – the belief that actions determine consequences.
Moral Agency – the belief that values require action.
Economic Agency – the belief that value-actions determine payoffs.

Causal Agency simply disintegrates in any system of metaphysical dualism or transcendence of consciousness. To separate at a cosmic scale the “free” mind from the “determined” body leads to impossible conclusions. If we take the freedom of the mind to its radical conclusions, we are entirely alone in our private universe of thoughts, unable to trust the reality of material objects, causality, existence of other agents, or the significance of memories. If we take the determination of material reality to its radical conclusions, we all have a passive experience of the objects around us; we float in a great ocean of helpless predetermination, unable to trust any sentimental mechanism that tells us otherwise.

Neither of these two directions away from common sense can become a foundation for a moral system. There is no positive system of values based on either set of extremes. One option sets us free but removes all objectivity and significance, the other option gives us causality but removes all choice and intention. Not one of these extreme options is in accordance with normal human actions, in which objectivity and consequences may be speculative but true of reality. We only find this dualism important in denial of our own death. Without this psychological escapism, the most rational paradigm is both the most obvious and the least comforting: limited causal agency because of cognitive selections is “free” despite emerging as a property from layers of “determined” complex adaptive systems.

Without causal agency, whether due to a lack of freedom or a lack of consequence, moral agency is impossible. The great irony, which humans avoid recognizing at all costs, is that the only path to a positive moral system is the absence of distinction between the material and immaterial. To make any action special, we must not presume we come into the event with any privilege. To make any event significant, we must not presume it is transcendentally justified or forbidden. Causal Agency is a pre-requisite for Moral Agency, while Moral Agency is a pre-requisite for value, meaning, and significance.

Moral Agency requires an authentic understanding of responsibility for our actions. These actions aggregate in every passing moment of life until death. The inability to undo decisions or drastically switch to a different life that requires a path of objectivity and dedication is a source of anxiety. The authentic life requires the courageous embrace of this anxiety. The world is real. Time is short. Death limits the time we have available. We cannot reverse time. We are responsible for our decisions.

This objectivity toward life, death, pain, and pleasure is the only way to build a moral system, dedicate our time to its significance, and gain certainty that our life held meaning. Morality is an internal decision to externalize our vision, whatever that vision entails. Morality is typically the delay of gratification or the bold tolerance short-term pain for the sake of a long-run value. Self-discipline and self-responsibility pursues not one value, but a system of values. Causal, moral, and economic agency is the pursuit, with clarity of responsibility, of a single lifetime that cannot replace or exchange itself for different world, life, or system, rather spatiotemporal or transcendent.

The destroyers of this objectivity do not argue directly against our freedom, agency, morality, or rationality – there is no need. Any bureaucratic machine only needs to inspire general doubt that certainty is possible. Dualism, in its materialist, subjectivist, and transcendental forms, becomes an immense propaganda campaign that leaves every socialized, indoctrinated cog saying, “I’m not sure if…” and, “I don’t know if we can…” such that the only morality is the valuation of governmental control. This is not skepticism for the sake of learning, exploration, or debate; it is the fundamental destruction of belief in opinion, action, and identity.

Once a population has lost Economic Agency in the valuation of their moral and causal significance, the bureaucratic machine pumps a sludge of propaganda, spectacle, and terror into the social body. Generalized slowdown, mediocrity, layering, committees, taxation, and redistribution all develop the same form of governance: centralization, security, and deterrence. Honest morally significant debate becomes impossible, as does representative democracy; both Republican socialists and Democratic socialists slowly pass laws that place the power of legislation outside the legislature and into programs, departments, and special interests. When the power of legislation no longer resides in the representatives, democratic accountability slowly dies.

The increased role of bureaucratic, arbitrary, amoral diffusion of responsibility spreads into every government-sanctioned oligarchy and monopoly, protected by tariffs, bailouts, grants, and regulatory oversight. The bloated publicly traded corporations created through government interventions survive by mimicking the parasitism that created them, only able to survive by duplicating the rationalization and socialization of institutional mediocrity.

We have already seen where this slow decline of civilized value creation leads. Democratic socialism loses its pretense of personal liberty once the entire nation is dependent on government or corporate bureaucracy. The impossibility of creative energy, freedom of thought, and responsibility for actions gradually drives out anyone with morality or ability. The economy, devoid of life, becomes increasingly nationalistic, preparing and fighting in endless wars, continuing to increase centralization of control over natural and human resources. The society incarcerates or institutionalizes a steady group of rebellious discontents and the marginalized precarious as one normalization boundary while an elaborate system of fantasy provides other. The indoctrinated society believes they are free in reality, but only in contrast with Guantanamo Bay and Disneyland.

The population that remains in the socialist machine, fully trained and conditioned for nationalism, collectivism, militarism, and subjection, finally trade their remaining liberty for a dictator. Unable to rely on the energy of new ideas, ambition, and goals, the nation looks for a scapegoat. Realizing that the freedom, value, and significance of an earlier era, parasitically destroyed by socialism and corporatism, leave the social body in total exhaustion. The guards posted at the nation’s borders turn inward, and the bureaucratic machine takes the final step into to fascism or communism; the enslaved society finally has its mediocre masters.

Each of these three forms of Agency Dilemma result in diffusion of responsibility. Agency Dilemma is the disconnection of power from consequences. When decisions become increasingly distributed across a hierarchy of narrow-minded bureaucratic interests, the ability for to parties to make a rational exchange diminishes. Frequently we find a mysterious “They” preventing actions. Between the shareholder and the customer stand thousands of employees with agency dilemma, no economic accountability, and moral diffusion of responsibility. Between the individual and the factory farms, sex slaves, and child trafficking stand thousands of bureaucrats with agency dilemma, no economic accountability, and moral diffusion of responsibility. Between the product developer and the end user, between the citizen and the law, between the teacher and the student, between the entrepreneur and international trade; agency dilemma, no economic accountability, and moral diffusion of responsibility.

Without causal agency, no action is possible, only motion, movement, perpetual flux, and meaningless assemblages. Without moral agency, no value is possible, only doubt, diffusion, sentiment, and distraction. Without economic agency, no freedom is possible, only mismanagement, accidents, and bureaucracy.

We built America on a single premise – my moral code and yours need not agree. We need only agree on our mutual but individual rights of liberty and value. Each President and legislature moves us closer to a Hitler or Lenin, then the steady decline of American importance on the world stage. As the only country from its inception a constitutional democratic republic, the world is watching our fall to mediocrity.

We must reclaim our liberty, creativity, and objectivity.